They circled one another, and he saw that she kicked her shoes off. There was a panting silence.
Oh well, thought Carver, he had lost nothing. There wasn’t a cat’s chance in a dog’s home that she would give anything away in casual conversation, and he could not very well open the chat with a remark like “Tell me about the slavery business, Djamalla, dear.”
At least he now knew there was no waiting ambush behind the bedroom door.
In any case, he was now committed. He feinted towards the door, stepped round the end of the settee, and was almost caught flat footed when she second-guessed him and flickered across the floor with a head-high karate kick which would have taken his head off if it had landed. As it was, her bare heel caught him a glancing blow across the top of the ear, and left his head ringing like a buoy-bell.
Somewhere, she had discarded the wrap-around skirt, and was wearing now only her tube top, and a pair of lace pants which would have made a Bluebell girl blush with embarrassment. He noticed, even as the cymbals clashed in his brain, that her legs, as was to have been expected, were glorious.
They were also very, very dangerous. He shrugged out of his jacket to give himself room, and she instantly tried to repeat the kick to the head.
This time, he was ready for it. As her foot scythed past, he caught it in the folds of the coat, and pulled. The girl staggered towards him and he turned his head just in time to avoid being blinded. Her hands were weaving like snakes, and like snakes, they had almost hypnotised just long enough for him to miss the true danger.
Carver was having to rethink his position fast. This was no ordinary prostitute, relying on a protector to keep her out of trouble. She had made no attempt to dive for an alarm button, and if there were some kind of bugging device, the man would have been in the room by now. The girl was relying on her own expertise for protection.
From the look of it, thought Carver, as he twisted to avoid another leopard-swift attack, she was not being overconfident.
The trouble was that he could have stopped her with one of the devastating kicks or punches of karate. But there was a very real risk that such a counter might easily kill her.
Dead, she would be just another silent witness. Alive she was his only lead to LeCorbiere and possibly to Irene, and time was passing.
He avoided yet another whirling onslaught, caught up one of the overstuffed cushions from the chair and blocked her next rapier kick.
The girl staggered for a moment, and he swept her feet from under her with the heavy cushion. She fell heavily, but even as she did so, she was twisting for the recovery. He put his foot on the hand which was supporting her, and she fell again.
This time he fell with her, blanketing her body with his own, relying on his extra size and considerable weight to keep her down.
At the same time his own fingers stabbed at the pressure point in her thigh, immobilising one leg. He could feel her fingers scrabbling at the back of his neck, and his next blow was at the side of hers. Her eyes glazed and her head rolled sideways, and for a panic stricken second, he thought he had killed her. But she was only stunned. He took the opportunity to carry her through into the bedroom, where a half-tester bed faced a ceiling high mirror. She would be able to watch herself having a headache, he thought, as he tied first her wrists to the uprights at the bed head and then her ankles to the uprights at the bottom with silk scarves from her chest of drawers. As a final precaution, he gagged her; made sure she could breathe, and began to search the flat.
As soon as he started he realised that he had been set up. The clothes which packed the wardrobes and drawers were for a much shorter, more heavily built woman, and the makeup which was untidily packed into the bathroom linen basket was for a dark woman, not a blonde.
Carver found her a moment later, pushed equally untidily into a linen cupboard on the landing, her eyes glazed and staring.
Her neck was broken and there was a dark mark across her upper lip like a badly shaven moustache.
He pulled her out and the body fell into the corridor like a stone of sausages. She had been dead only a short time, though the warmth of the linen cupboard would make it difficult to work out exactly how long.
He pulled her limbs out straight and pulled her skirt down over the stockinged legs. She had been a handsome woman, with strong, dark face and a compact, well-formed body. Her hair was black and her eyes, in which there was still an expression of surprise, had been magnificent, large and black.
He knew precisely what the curious depression between those eyes meant, too. She had first been stunned by the blow to her upper lip, and then killed with a more powerful blow to the thin bone between her eyes.
His face thoughtful, he went back to the bedroom. The girl on the bed was awake now, and looking at him over her gag with a mixture of rage and fear. Carver stood at the foot of the bed and examined her carefully.
When he had assured himself her bonds were tight, he took one of her hands in his and looked it over.
Immediately, he found the signs he had been looking for. The finger nails, heavily lacquered with a dark, shiny polish, were all false, built up with some kind of plastic on a stubby, strong natural nail.
Examined closely, the knuckles showed a curious tendency to flattening and broadening, and there was a seam of calloused skin along the side of the hand.
Her feet, slender and pretty though they were, had a similar line of callous along the outside edge and there was a thick pad of skin on the ball of the foot which was not duplicated on the heel. The soles of her feet were toughened and marked.
“You have spent much of your life without shoes,” he told her softly without looking at her face to see if he was right.
“Recently, you have been training hard in the military arts. What is it? Karate? Kung Fu? Something on those lines.”
Hard, hating eyes were glaring at him over the gag. He patted her thigh casually as he stood up.
“I’ll tell you what I think, kid, and then we’ll talk. In the meantime, I think you’d best stay tied down. Poor little Djamalla just told me how lucky I was just now. I don’t think I’d better give you any chance to put that right, do you?”
He grinned at her, but the sight clearly did nothing to reassure his prisoner. She merely stared at him over the silken gag. It was significant to him that she had made no attempt to free herself while he had been in the room. That meant that she had already tested her ties when he was outside, and found them too strong to break. Now, she was saving her strength instead of making futile attempts to pull free against bonds she would never slacken.
It pointed to an expertise and training against all her appearance. The physical evidence told him she was a practised combat expert.
“Now, you were sent here tonight to shut up Djamalla, and you sure did that well enough. Hit her as she opened the door? Yeah, that’s what I’d guess. She never knew what happened, did she? It’s okay, kid, I don’t expect any answers. Don’t get all wound up. Now, what I need to find out from you is what it was that poor little Djamalla was not supposed to tell me. Something so important that she had to die for it. Maybe the fact that her boyfriend worked for a man called LeCorbiere, huh? No, not important enough and I could find that out anyway. Where LeCorbiere is at the moment? That’s easy, he’s either at his Paris flat or down in the Cap. He isn’t in Paris, so he’s got to be down there, right? Right. Nobody dies to conceal that kind of knowledge; it just isn’t worth the risk. So what is he doing down in the Cap? He goes down there for one reason and for one reason only. To supervise the next sale. So there’s a sale coming up. Ahaha!”
Deep in the violet eyes glaring up at him there had been a tiny flicker, like a fish moving in the dark depths of a midnight pool.
A sale coming up. A sale in which Irene might be part of the merchandise. But where? He could hardly look it up in the local paper.
“Now, where would I hold a sale if I were a slave dealer?” he s
aid, musingly. “Not at my home, certainly. And in a villa where would I keep all the merchandise? No, no. It would have to be in some bigger place which had nothing to do with me personally. On a yacht, perhaps. A big yacht, of course. Moored off shore.”
No flicker. He was shooting blind and well wide of the mark. He hitched himself off the bed, and took off his jacket and shirt. The girl’s eyes widened as he did so, but there was no trace of fear in them.
He caught her look and laughed, genuinely amused.
“No, not rape,” he said. “I never found it necessary, and I sure don’t have any taste for screwing killers like you, baby. It ain’t my bag.”
He went to the kitchen where he found a collection of excellent cooking knives and a steel. There was a small portable food warmer with a charcoal element standing on the draining board, and a length of dark, spicy sausage hanging from a hook over the stove. He put it down and took the lot into the bedroom.
The girl’s eyes followed him as he cleared the bedside table and plugged in the food warmer next to her head.
He put down the sausage and tried the edge of the knives one at a time on the ball of his thumb. They were keen but not razor sharp, and he set to work on the largest one with the steel, talking as he worked.
“Let me tell you about me, baby. I may sound like a pure dee American boy, but appearances sure can be deceptive. Pure I ain’t. My old daddy was a Dakota. What you would call a Sioux Indian. They used to call him Big Tom Carver – he sure was big. When he came close to me, I used to think the sun had gone in.”
He tried the edge of the knife, shook his head and returned to his easy, stropping action. The girl’s eyes followed the hypnotic swing of the blade as it caught the remaining bedside light.
“Now, there’s a lot of things you can say about them old Sioux. They called ‘em braves, and they was certainly that. They surely were brave. And inventive? Wowee!”
He stole a glance at her. Her throat worked convulsively under the collar.
“In fact, they was so brave that they admired courage above all the other virtues in other people as well. When they took prisoners in war, they used to wonder whether the guys they had taken was as brave as they was themselves. Used to test ‘em, to see.”
He was deliberately talking in the sing-song dialect of his childhood, now, a hypnotic rhythm to go with the zip-zip sound of the knife on steel.
“You ever seen anybody skinned alive, girl? Nope, of course not. Quite a sight to see. Takes time, o’course. They need to do it over a slow fire to kind of loosen the hide up first, then work on them with a knife, very much like this one.”
He stopped the stropping. The girl’s eyes were now almost circular and staring. She could not tear them from the knife.
He picked up the length of sausage, and held it where she could see it. Then he cut two thin slices from the end and let them drop onto the food warmer. There was a sharp hiss, and the meat began to sizzle. The smell of frying pork filled the room.
“Of course, you can’t light a slow fire in a Paris flat,” he said conversationally. “You have to improvise. But the principle is the same.”
He reached out and took the top of the sequined tube which hid her breasts, slipped the tip of the knife under it and slit it from top to bottom. Two rose-tipped mounds quivered as she drew a shuddering breath round the gag.
“Then there’s the paleface,” he said. He caught sight of himself in the mirror at the bottom of the bed. Artistically, the scene needed something else. He tore a strip from the bed linen of the late Djamalla, and bound it round his head, Apache style. It might not fit quite with the Sioux role he had chosen, but there wasn’t time to find eagle feathers and paint.
An Indian face stared back at him from the mirror. In the low light, his skin had taken on a dark coppery tone, and his dark, green eyes and high, broad cheekbones reminded him suddenly of a photograph he had once seen of Crazy Horse. He gave a low chuckle and was surprised to hear a strangled sound from the girl on the bed. She was twisting and fighting against the scarves, but the material held her fast in its silken grip.
“The white eyes,” he said to her, “had an interesting habit. They used to skin our women’s breasts and make tobacco pouches out of them.”
He leaned forward and tapped the rounded side of her breast with the side of the knife blade.
“They start just here, and work their way round...”
From behind the gag came a high, thin, keening sound. Her eyes were pools of sheer uncontrollable panic. He considered drawing her attention to the smoking sausage on the food warmer once again, but realised as her eyeballs began to slide upwards in their sockets that it was not necessary.
“What I want to know is where and when the next sale takes place,” he said, softly. “Nod your head when you are ready to tell me.”
He swung onto the bed astride her hips, and her head nodded so madly that he was afraid she would break her own neck.
He leaned forward, put a hand on her forehead to hold her head still, and slit the gag with the knife. She was talking even before the silk was properly out of her mouth.
“Stop.” She stopped instantly, eyes fastened on the knife.
“Say it clearly.”
“On Saturday,” she said in a high pitched sob.
“And this is Tuesday. Where?”
“The Château Bram.”
“Where the hell is that?”
“Near Carcassonne. Not very far from Beziers.”
“Is it one of LeCorbiere’s houses?”
She shook her head. Her face was slowly regaining the blood which terror had drained from it.
“It belongs to an Englishman.”
“Do you know his name?”
“They call him L’Ombrageux.”
Well, if you didn’t have an exact parallel for Dark, L’Ombrageux, the man of shadows, would do real nicely till you did, thought Carver wonderingly.
He glanced down at the girl. Her breath was coming more smoothly, now that the immediate threat had been removed.
“How do I get in there?” he said.
All the panic had gone from her eyes now, and the pupils had returned to more or less their normal size. Now, she was thinking again instead of just reacting. Now, she was becoming dangerous again.
“How do I get in there?” he repeated. In the depths, something flickered and was gone. It was, he recognised with resignation, his chance of getting one final truthful answer from her. From now on, she would lie cleverly and believably, and as soon as he released her, would shift Heaven and Earth to warn her boss.
“You go to the Villa at Beziers and give them a password,” she said, too calmly.
“And the password?”
“It changes every few days. Release me and I will find out for you what it will be this week.”
She would have to go to prison, he knew. He wondered if Amy had enough pull with her department to get the girl looked up and held incommunicado, until he had penetrated the castle at Carcassonne.
He left the girl tied to the bed, and went into the other room. Amy’s number rang a few times, but there was no reply.
He was making for the bedroom once again when the lock scraped, and the front door began, very gently, to open.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Sigmund Dark awakened shuddering in the night and sat upright in his bed. The girl beside him was instantly awake, though she lay where she was without moving and without showing any sign of wakefulness save her open eyes.
There was no need to announce that she was awake. He would assume that she was, anyway. Just as he would assume her unquestioning obedience to anything he demanded of her, including her own death.
The big man climbed from his bed and went to the window, where he stood and gazed out onto the moonlit valley below, a study in silver and black like an exquisitely worked piece of embroidery.
The night air was as warm as the day in thi
s chamber, once the solar of the castellan of Bram. The cold shiver which ran up his spine and gently ruffled the short hairs on the nape of his neck had nothing to do with ambient air temperature. It was, rather, the first faint susurration of suspicion.
He put up one hand and massaged the back of his head. The movement made the massive muscles across his shoulders bunch and writhe. The girl in the bed watched their play passively, and with one detached corner of her mind admired their beauty and strength.
“Come here.” His voice was low and rumbling and the girl, who was accustomed to listening to its cadences and interpreting their inner meanings, heaved a carefully silent sigh of relief, slid from the bed and padded across the floor to stand beside him in the moonlight.
“Look down there, on the road.”
She leaned forward and peered through the dark to where the double ribbon of the motorway was a river of white and red lights as it swept down to Carcassonne.
He chuckled without humour.
“No, not there. The road from the North, girl. The road from the mountains. Do you not see him, there on the road?”
She peered doubtfully but dutifully towards the mountains.
“You mean the road from Saissac?” she asked uncertainly.
“No, the road from London,” he said in a gravelly whisper. “There is a man on the road from London and I cannot stop him.”
The statement was so uncharacteristic that for a moment, she did the unthinkable and stared open mouthed at him. He caught her look and broke into a bellow of laughter.
“Did that surprise you, little Kiti? Then let us find some other way to surprise you and delight you instead,” he roared, and with one sweep of his arm, he caught her up, crushing her wriggling curves against his massive chest, and carried her to the bed where for a very long time he treated her in a way which did not surprise her in the least and delighted her very little.
When it was at last over and he lay, sleeping, with one hand entangled still between her thighs, she examined his face carefully in the moonlight, and then, with infinite care so as not to disturb him, she slipped from the bed and made her way into the bathroom where she showered as silently as possible and powdered and perfumed herself before returning to the bedroom.
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